DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

52 hours with no light and no running water. 52 hours of early nights, of dirty dishes that can’t be washed, of hauling buckets of rainwater to flush toilets. 52 hours of the walls closing in. 52 hours of sweaty lunchmeats in a dank refrigerator, assaulting the senses of anyone who dares to venture inside.

52 hours of the beer smelling like salami.

We coped with the outage fairly well, and when I say “fairly well,” I’m lying. We depend on electricity to live, and I bet half the population would begin hunting their neighbors for sport within 72 hours if the lights ever went off for good.

Photos from the Great Storm of 2008

Five years ago, we lost power for 75 hours — just over three days with no lights, no heat, no running water. It was miserable, but I was home alone at the time, and I coped reasonably well (as far as you know).

This time it’s worse. We’re only 30 hours in, but we have three extra bodies in the house, including two houseguests and one toddler.

The electric utility hasn’t even given us an estimate of when they might restore service. They haven’t even come out to assess it. PG&E reports 450 separate outages, and ours apparently doesn’t rank high enough to warrant any attention.

I figured out today what the problem is. It’s nothing mysterious or difficult to diagnose — there’s a live electrical wire laying in the street. Some thoughtful neighbors have strung yellow “CAUTION” tape across a couple trash cans to prevent folks from driving over the cable and electrocuting themselves.

Just above are a couple of extremely tall redwoods leaning about 2045° off of vertical. If the tree they’re leaning on gives way, the whole lot will end up on the road, which among other things means I’ll have to walk the last mile home (with 20 lbs of ice and six gallons of water).

Anyway, you have to figure that if PG&E can’t spare a crew to come out and coil up a live wire that’s been laying on a wet street for a day and a half, then the power situation must be pretty bad.

During the last long blackout five years ago, I commented that I’d rather spend money on a solar-electric system than a generator. I’ve done that, and just like last time, sunny skies have returned long before the electricity. But I’ve since learned that grid-tied PV systems don’t work without the grid. So although the system on my roof could easily power us through a houseful of warm showers and overdue loads of laundry, it’s as cold and dark as we are inside. We’ll end up buying a generator anyway.

Your mom sent you a Psycho Kitty kard.

What would you say to someone whose goal is to plant 8 million trees in an African desert?

Fortunately nobody asked me, and they’re proceeding with the project. It got a kick-start last week when the folks behind the Web2Summit conference — O’Reilly Media and CMP Media — purchased a tree for each of the conference’s 1200 participants. I love the idea; it’s the most thoughtful and most environmentally-conscious conference schwag I’ve ever received. Read more about it.

(I wonder if Dale Dougherty had something to do with this decision? His post from April about wasteful conference schwag may have been a tipping point. The Web2Summit did have a schwag bag, but it was much emptier than normal — significantly less paper waste — and the bag itself was meant to be reused.) (photo credit: violet.blue)

Anyway, kudos to O’Reilly and CMP and whoever sold this idea to the conference organizers.

I planted a second tree just now. Here’s my Tree-Nation profile.